September 2007

Another week comes to a close. September felt like a blur to me. I hope it was slower for you. As usual, I am clearing out some odds and ends from the personal finance world. In mergers and acquisitions news, Four Pillars and Mr. Cheap have merged their blog into a super-blog. Unlike CN’s acquisition [...]

I beginning to believe that this week is bad customer service week. Canadian Capitalist posted the other day on giving up on Questrade discount brokerage (although in their defense, their “Customer Acquisition Supervisor” seems great based on a response back to the blog). Professionally, we have been extremely frustrated by our bank who took several [...]

Welcome to Real Estate Wednesday! For the next three Wednesdays, I have the privilege of a guest blogger who we named “New Home Buyer” for privacy reasons who will post of their experience in buying a new house. This post reminds me of something Wayne Gretzky once said: “you miss 100% of the shots you [...]

Recently my friend Judi told me that she believed that the term “passive income” is the most over-used and mis-used term in personal investing. From what she told me, a lot of people she meets are working on producing “passive income” streams even if they are not. The fundamental source of her frustration was that [...]

I didn’t have the possibility of posting this on Friday because of business travel. Nonetheless, here’s a tardy odds and ends from the personal finance world: Real Estate Guy who guest-blogged on Tuesday about the pros of real estate investing has a possible opportunity for those who wish to learn more about real estate investing. [...]

Today continues our two part series on the pros and cons of real estate investing. Yesterday’s post dealt with the a pro real estate investor. Today is the con side from someone I will call Anti-Real Estate Guy. Both are friends of mine who have graciously agreed to blog on their positive and/or negative experiences [...]

As I mentioned last week, I have two guest bloggers this week who will blog on two different sides of residential real estate investing. One will post on why he is a real estate investor and the other will post on why he is leaving the residential real estate game. Both are friends of mine [...]

I was looking at my financial account statements on Friday to see what my asset allocation is and I started tracking back to much older statements. I went back to the 90′s and things looked quite ugly. Hindsight being 20/20, I must have made almost every investing mistake you could make. Thankfully, I made them [...]

Whether its my house, my parent’s house or a friend’s, I noticed that everyone seems to have a spare drawer- usually in the kitchen- where they keep “stuff”. I called it the junk drawer growing up and it is the misc. drawer in my condo. The drawer has a hodge-podge of everything-from old coupons to [...]

For most of us who live in large cities, buying real estate in established neighborhoods is either not possible or requires a massive amount of leveraging. It is becoming especially difficult for first-time home buyers to purchase anything not in the suburbs. For most of us who want to live in the city proper, our [...]

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